Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's duty to burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper for a woman after her husband's death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. {244} Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare that they would prefer the suttee.
And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in the case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."
Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.
The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God," {245} is enough to assure one that Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictures which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of the prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial Highness, the second Alexander (Lord of the two Horns) King Shah Jehan," and we may see in Agra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts,
"Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her--"Pride of the Palace." And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood--that way along which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carrying in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built--"in memory of a deathless love," and in a garden which is always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court-ladies tending their princess," there stands this dream in marble, "the most exquisite building on earth."
With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed.
Madras, India.
{246}
XXV
MORE LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK